Brief Thoughts on the Death of J.D. Salinger

Editor’s Note: “Underground Nashville” covers artists, authors, musicians, poets, political figures, and other compelling people and happenings not typically covered by the mainstream Nashville media. It also presents reflections and commentary from an underground/indie perspective. As I told ‘The Tennessean’ in 2008, “since moving to Nashville twenty-five years ago, I have met people whose lives do not remotely reflect the caricature of what many outside our city presume to be a ‘Nashvillian’ or the Nashville experience. “Underground Nashville” thus explores the soul of the city, not its surface—offering “thoughts from the shadows of a great American city.”

Dave Carew

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Brief Thoughts on J.D. Salinger’s Passing

By Dave Carew

Like many who intensely value American literature, I was saddened to hear of the death this week of J.D. Salinger. One of the first reviews of my novel Everything Means Nothing to Me: A Novel of Underground Nashville has compared the “voice” of my work to that of Salinger, so I’ve felt an additional kinship to him since that review appeared.

Also, in 2007, I had mentioned, while being interviewed about my novel by The Vanderbilt Hustler, that I admired Salinger’s walking away while he still was on top. While other formerly-great literary or musical artists put out a relentless body of work long after their talent has dried up (think Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and a heavenly host of others), Salinger refused to do that. He wrote one tremendous, artistic-landscape-changing novel (Catcher in the Rye), and a few other works, then “did a DiMaggio”…i.e., hung up his spikes while he still was on top.

As I wrote yesterday in an e-mail to a friend, “The axiom of the artist should be this: If you have nothing left to say, don’t say it.”

I’ll also respect Salinger for doing exactly that.

David M. (Dave) Carew is editor of “Underground Nashville” and the author of the novels “Everything Means Nothing to Me: A Novel of Underground Nashville” and “Voice from the Gutter.” He also is a freelance publicist and copywriter.